Windows Live Writer Wish List

Microsoft released a new version of Live Writer. It’s a tool to make blogging easier. it comes with a host of great new features (check out Digital Inspiration’s take on it), but there are a few that are missing that I’d like to see:

Sync drafts to the “cloud” for editing on another computer with Live Writer. I found a workaround for this temporarily, but it should be standard.

Insert Picasa Web Album. I know it’s a Microsoft product, but I’d love to see a way to enter the URL for a PicasaWeb album and it goes to the site, logs in as me and downloads/inserts the code necessary to make the photo album appear in my blog.

Better Draft Management. How hard would it be to add folders to the draft section? Let me sort my drafts!

Firefox Integration. While we’re at it, why not an extension for Firefox that allows me to push a button while at a web page and have it copy the current page title/link into a new draft. Bonus points if I can title the draft and mark which folder it should go into.

A working “Check for Updates” button. The last two versions have not been found by the existing check for updates feature. Make it work like Firefox, where it checks on load, then gives the option to install the new version on load.

In other news, the most useful change out of the gate is addition of the tags field on the same line as the categories and publish date fields. I hated expanding the bottom section to get to tags. Of course, it only appears to be available if you haven’t downloaded your blog template for the editor from WordPress. Irritating that I lost the look of my blog while editing, but worth it for the tags thing. Maybe that will be fixed in the next version.

6 responses

@ Jason
Regarding point 1, I agree. I’ve only been playing with WLW for a couple of days and I haven’t fully explored it yet, but maybe there’s an option to Edit Drafts saved online? I know that WLW supports saving Drafts online if you’re a WordPress blogger, so the reverse wouldn’t be a huge leap!

Re point 3 – I’m a folders man myself, but this move from static folders to dynamic lookup aka searching seems to increasingly the way things are working with online content, and it certainly works in Gmail, although there you can at least replicate folders to some extent with Tags.

@interface: The search feature may be good enough for now. My frustration stems from the last 6 months with WLW. I currently keep a folder full of links in Firefox divided into various categories as I build up enough material for an in-depth series of posts. I’ll live with search for a while and see what happens. Maybe that will be enough for me. It certainly is a great improvement to get started with.

Hi Jason, the tagging feature is orthogonal to the blog editing template. Are you getting an error when you do View | Refresh Theme? If so, please e-mail me your log file (Help | About | Show log file). Thanks!

@Joe: The downloading of the theme failed when doing it from the Edit Blog Settings/Update Account Configuration screen. It would spend a long time trying to download, then report a failure. Doing it with View/Refresh Theme fixed the problem. Thanks!